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Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café exposes the high-minded follies of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s circle in Paris, says Jane O’Grady

Today you hardly need to be an old buffer to lament that the principal role models of the young are football stars, fashion designers, and a fast-revolving series of singers and rappers. More than their ephemeral, promotion-backed talent, it is wealth, exorbitantly priced clothes or even their buttocks that have earned our stars the right to air their (invariably half-baked) ideas.

At the Existentialist Café takes us back to pre- and post-Second World War Paris when it was the exposition of ideas that earned the fame – when philosophers and philosophy itself were sexy, glamorous, outrageous; when sensuality and erudition were entwined, and entry to chic nightclubs guaranteed if you had a book under your arm. In 1945, when Jean-Paul Sartre gave a public lecture on existentialism, the hall was so overcrowded that he took 15 minutes to reach the stage; chairs broke, people fainted, police and ambulances were called.

In 1945, when Jean-Paul Sartre gave a public lecture on existentialism, the hall was so overcrowded that he took 15 minutes to reach the stage

Existentialism was the rage but what is existentialism? It was a question frequently asked then, and it is still asked now, perhaps because, although initially inspiring, the answers are ultimately unsatisfying. Freedom, authenticity, engagement – to be is to do – but what should I engage myself in? By their own remit, existentialists can only say: “Choose!” They cannot say what the choices should be.

The existentialists whose lives Sarah Bakewell describes spanned the political spectrum. The French ones were mostly Left-leaning, each sliding uneasily between communism, Stalinism, Maoism and social democracy over the years; the German Heidegger, on the other hand, espoused Nazism and never properly recanted. The spread is understandable: if, following Edmund Husserl, you have to examine how things appear, without any preconceptions about what they are, then the only moral demand is that you act without consulting any previously accepted morality.

Boris and Michelle Vian with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir in Saint Germain des Pres, Paris, 1949Credit:
Rex Features

Bakewell includes some overlooked existentialists: the black American novelists James Baldwin and Richard Wright who stayed in Paris; the English working-class autodidact Colin Wilson, who wrote The Outsider in the British Museum Reading Room while living in a tent on Hampstead Heath. As well as capturing Simone de Beauvoir’s cerebral sensuality and Albert Camus’ warmth and restraint, she conveys Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s beautiful account of how, in perceiving, we combine all of our senses, appetites and previous knowledge in “a synaesthetic swirl”: we “see” the pane of glass as fragile and smooth, and the blanket as soft; we “read” the flexibility of the branch from which a bird has just sprung; when we lean on a desk with both hands, “the whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail”.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1967Credit:
Rex Features

Bakewell doesn’t say much new about Sartre and de Beauvoir. We get the usual anecdotes about Sartre in a Montparnasse café turning pale when he is told that, in newfangled phenomenology, “you can make philosophy out of anything, even this apricot cocktail”. We hear of his conversion from contemptuous individualism to socialist camaraderie as a result of living cheek by jowl with working-class men in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1940; his acclaim by the students of 1968; his political quarrels with the Communist Party, Camus and Arthur Koestler.

As in other accounts, he and de Beauvoir come across as elitist and ruthless – less involved in the French Resistance than they later claimed and semi-apologists for the Soviet Union even after Sartre had visited it in 1954, when they knew about the gulags.

They lived out their freedom in an open relationship, which included seducing, sharing and discarding young women, among them de Beauvoir’s high-school students. This ill accords with her liberating feminist philosophy and fiction, and her acerbic analysis of how women are looked at and objectified, restricted to being the “other”. The revered existentialist couple would nowadays be accused of “grooming”. It comes as a shock when Bakewell approvingly cites Merleau-Ponty’s claim that what people never realised about Sartre was that “il est bon”.

Sartre and de Beauvoir in 1940Credit:
Rex Features

Heidegger, however, is presented as unremittingly odious. He constantly exhorted us to work our way from the habitual “they-self” to authenticity, but happily embraced Nazi totalitarianism. Despite all that stuff about “solicitude” for others, and moments when we “leap in” for someone else, he abandoned his generous Jewish teacher Husserl and his dissident students. After the war he evaded questions about his political stance, and retired to his hut in the Black Forest, purporting to have been badly treated and misunderstood.

Bakewell shows that his increasingly mystical philosophy anticipated the Green movement; however, his sentimentality in condemning factory farming as “in essence the same” as the death camps was disgustingly inapt. “It was as if there was something about everyday human life that the great philosopher of everydayness did not get,” comments Bakewell. The same could be said about most of the thinkers she describes.

Still, there is something heroic about these anti-heroes and their stern acknowledgement that we inhabit a disenchanted world, dizzyingly bereft of the “guard rail” of rules. They attempted to build meaning out of meaninglessness.

This tender, incisive and fair account of the existentialists ends with their successive deaths, leaving me with the same sense of nostalgia and loss as one feels after reading a great epic novel.